The Queer Turn in Feminism

Identities, Sexualities, and the Theater of Gender

Anne Emmanuelle Berger and Translated by Catherine Porter

This book takes a tough theoretical look at the position of queer theory and gender studies in a time that many proclaim is "after" these movements.

Anne Berger, who is now at University of Paris, Nanterre, taught for many years at Cornell. She has thus been in an excellent position to observe the seesawing of queer studies and gender theory between the two sides of the Atlantic--first "French theory" in American, now "American thought" in France.

Berger is especially attentive to nuances of how gender theory developed in its cultural and historical settings, such as the "odd couple" of gender theory and performance theory.

The Queer Turn in Feminism

Identities, Sexualities, and the Theater of Gender

Anne Emmanuelle Berger and Translated by Catherine Porter

Description

More than any other area of late-twentieth-century thinking, gender theory and its avatars have been to a large extent a Franco-American invention. In this book, a leading Franco-American scholar traces differences and intersections in the development of gender and queer theories on both sides of the Atlantic. Looking at these theories through lenses that are both "American" and "French," thus simultaneously retrospective and anticipatory, she tries to account for their alleged exhaustion and currency on the two sides of the Atlantic.

The book is divided into four parts. In the first, the author examines two specifically "American" features of gender theories since their earliest formulations: on the one hand, an emphasis on the theatricality of gender
(from John Money's early characterization of gender as "role playing" to Judith Butler's appropriation of Esther Newton's work on drag queens); on the other, the early adoption of a "queer" perspective on gender issues.

In the second part, the author reflects on a shift in the rhetoric concerning sexual minorities and politics that is prevalent today. Noting a shift from efforts by oppressed or marginalized segments of the population to make themselves "heard" to an emphasis on rendering themselves "visible," she demonstrates the formative role of the American civil rights movement in this new drive to visibility.

The third part deals with the travels back and forth across the Atlantic of "sexual difference," ever since its elevation to the status of
quasi-concept by psychoanalysis. Tracing the "queering" of sexual difference, the author reflects on both the modalities and the effects of this development.

The last section addresses the vexing relationship between Western feminism and capitalism. Without trying either to commend or to decry this relationship, the author shows its long-lasting political and cultural effects on current feminist and postfeminist struggles and discourses. To that end, she focuses on one of the intense debates within feminist and postfeminist circles, the controversy over prostitution.

The Queer Turn in Feminism

Identities, Sexualities, and the Theater of Gender

Anne Emmanuelle Berger and Translated by Catherine Porter

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

1. Parabasis (Before the Act)2. Queens and Queers: The Theater of Gender in "America"3. Paradoxes of Visibility in / and Contemporary Identity Politics 4. The Ends of an Idiom, or Sexual Difference in Translation 5. Roxana's Legacy: Feminism and Capitalism in the West

Notes Works Cited Index

The Queer Turn in Feminism

Identities, Sexualities, and the Theater of Gender

Anne Emmanuelle Berger and Translated by Catherine Porter

Author Information

Anne Emmanuelle Berger is currently professor of French Literature and Gender Studies at the Universite Paris 8 Vincennes Saint-Denis, where she heads the Centre d'etudes feminines et d'etudes de genre. She is also director of a new national Institute for Gender Studies (Institut du Genre), backed by the CNRS and 32 French institutions for higher education. Her most recent publications include Demenageries: Thinking (of) Animals After Derrida.

Catherine Porter is Professor Emerita, SUNY College at Cortland; a former president of the Modern Language Association; and a renowned translator of French philosophy and theory.

The Queer Turn in Feminism

Identities, Sexualities, and the Theater of Gender

Anne Emmanuelle Berger and Translated by Catherine Porter

Reviews and Awards

"The scholarship of the book is a treat, as is the care with which Berger attends to distinctions or crafts a sentence."-E.S. Burt, University of California, Irvine

"Even the most practiced readers of queer theory and feminist theory--perhaps especially those readers--will find that The Queer Turn in Feminism takes them into unexpected and exhilarating critical terrain. By staging the numerous critical encounters between 'French theory' and 'American theory' that continue into the present, by offering readings that are as theoretically nuanced as they are rhetorically engaging, Anne Berger reinvigorates old debates in order to open up crucial questions still to be addressed."--Elizabeth Weed, Brown University

"Brilliantly exploring the paradoxes of an American feminism inspired and invigorated by French theory and a French études du genre stimulated by American queer theory, Anne Berger offers a fascinating romp through the vicissitudes of feminist and post-feminist ideas, performance studies, and identity politics on both sides of the Atlantic, shrewdly articulating the differences as she explores the translatability of progressive ideas."--Jonathan Culler, Cornell University